Anti-Sex League Favors "Purity" Over Women's Health

By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check. Posted January 28, 2009.

As the Obama administration takes power and begins a series of ambitious reforms, it's time to start assessing the damage done by the Bush administration and plotting ways to reverse it. In the field of sexual health, one of the most aggravating problems the Bush administration left for others to clean up is the insertion of right wing radicals into foreign aid programs, radicals who happily use the cover of doing good to unleash grievous harm, shoving their radical anti-sex and anti-contraception program onto a worldwide stage.  The real life Anti-Sex League has exploited the public's concerns over the spread of HIV to push a radical anti-contraception agenda dressed up as an HIV prevention program, even though the GAO indicates that anti-contraception attitudes cripple genuine efforts to stall the spread of the disease.

Denying people access to condoms in order to make sure they don't spread HIV works as well as denying people sneakers in order to encourage them to take up jogging.  

A recent lawsuit filed by the ACLU demonstrates that anti-contraception radicals are using government money to push outlandish views in more areas than just HIV relief. In the year 2000, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a way to help anyone who's been trafficked -- which includes men, women, and children -- to regain their health and their lives. Naturally, the Anti-Sex League decided that since this issue involves sex and women (even though it's sexual behavior related to coercion, by virtue of the "trafficking" language) it presented a great opportunity to jump in and provide services that adhered only to its anti-contraception agenda.

According to the Boston Globe, the ACLU is taking the federal government to court over the funding given to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (U.S.CCB),money the U.S.CCB then sub-grants to organizations which help trafficking victims with health care, housing, and job training. U.S.CCB won't allow its sub-grantees to offer complete health care though, especially the kind likely to be most important to vulnerable young women who have been exposed to sexual abuse - proper reproductive health care, including access to contraception and abortion. They won't even allow sub-grantees to provide information about the availability of comprehensive reproductive health care. Considering the hell these women have already suffered, adding more hell seems to be a perverse way of "helping" them.

Refusing to help trafficking victims regain control over their bodies through access to contraception should they want it also contradicts the anti-trafficking message. The legislation was passed, ostensibly, because as a society we decry the exploitation of women. Depriving women of contraception in hopes of forcing them to bear children against their will is just another flavor of exploitation of women. In the Daily Women's Health Policy Report, ACLU staff attorney Brigitte Amiri points out that traffickers manipulate trafficking victims into getting pregnant as a tool to dominate and control their victims. Forced abortions in unsafe settings are also common. So what kind of help could the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops really offer if their solution to the horror of rape and forced pregnancy is more forced pregnancy?

See more stories tagged with: religion, women, rape, contraception, trafficking, abstinence, hiv, sexuality, aclu, prostitution, sexual health, purity, anti-sex league

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

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